And since counting and language are interlinked reading to your toddlers is equally, if not more, important. Should parents count with their toddlers? Absolutely, using a variety of real objects. This is the first stage in learning maths and it's the building block for many early concepts. This comes from their innate sense of number.Д¬ounting is learned when the toddler starts making the connection between this innate sense of 'how many there are' and the language we use to count 'one, two, buckle my shoe'. Research suggest that toddlers - even as young as 12 months - have a sense of how many there are in a set - up to around three objects. Far from it, weвЂ™re all born ready to learn maths вЂ“ and itвЂ™s what happens in the first 10 years or so that sets us up. There are other theories too - such as maths being an extension of our spatial awareness вЂ“ but thereвЂ™s something nice in the idea of a вЂњlittle maths starter kitвЂќ.ДЄ Word of warning - All this doesn't mean a child is predestined to be either good at maths or not. In maths as in language he believes, 'kids start off with little starter kits' And their maths starter kit is the number module. Remote tribes can count even when they have no words for numbers. Sure, we have to learn the names and symbols of numbers to develop that instinct, but, because the number module is hardwired into the brain, basic counting comes naturally. Wrong, says Butterworth - it's an instinct. Like times tables and algebra, we tend to think it's something kids have to be taught. He compares this idea to colour вЂ“ in the same way we perceive the вЂњgreennessвЂќ of a leaf we can also perceive the вЂњtwonessвЂќ or вЂњthreenessвЂќ of a group of objects.

Neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth in his book вЂњ The Mathematical BrainвЂќ suggests weвЂ™re born with an innate sense of number hard-wired into our brain and he attributes this to a small region of the brain behind the left ear he calls 'the number module'. ItвЂ™s first worth considering where our capacity to do mathematics comes from. Counting is easily taken for granted but there's a lot of fascinating research into how we learn to count - and there's more to it than you may think.

Numbers help me count